cyber vulnerabilities to dod systems may include

Two years ago, in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act [1], Congress called on the Defense Department to evaluate the extent of cyber vulnerabilities in its weapons systems by 2019. See also Martin C. Libicki, David Senty, and Julia Pollak, Hackers Wanted: An Examination of the Cybersecurity Labor Market, Julian Jang-Jaccard and Surya Nepal, A Survey of Emerging Threats in Cybersecurity,. Around 68% of companies have been said to experience at least one endpoint attack that compromised their data or infrastructure. Based on this analysis, this capability could proactively conduct threat-hunting against those identified networks and assets to seek evidence of compromise, identify vulnerabilities, and deploy countermeasures to enable early warning and thwart adversary action. As stated in the, , The Department must defend its own networks, systems, and information from, malicious cyber activity and be prepared to defend, when directed, those networks and systems operated by non-DOD-owned Defense Critical Infrastructure (DCI) and Defense Industrial Base (DIB) entities. Ensuring the Cyber Mission Force has the right size for the mission is important. George Perkovich and Ariel E. Levite (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017), 147157; and Justin Sherman, How the U.S. Can Prevent the Next Cyber 9/11,, https://www.wired.com/story/how-the-us-can-prevent-the-next-cyber-911/. The power and growing reliance on AI generates a perfect storm for a new type of cyber-vulnerability: attacks targeted directly at AI systems and components. . Another pathway through which adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities in weapons systems is the security of the DOD supply chainthe global constellation of components and processes that form the production of DOD capabilitieswhich is shaped by DODs acquisitions strategy, regulations, and requirements. Task Force Report: Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat, (Washington, DC: DOD, January 2013), available at <, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/docs/Cyber-081.pdf, Audit of the DoDs Management of the Cybersecurity Risks for Government Purchase Card Purchases of the Commercial Off-the-Shelf Items, , Report No. Because many application security tools require manual configuration, this process can be rife with errors and take considerable . The objective of this audit was to determine whether DoD Components took action to update cybersecurity requirements for weapon systems in the Operations and Support (O&S) phase of the acquisition life cycle, based on publicly acknowledged or known cybersecurity threats and intelligence-based cybersecurity threats. L. No. The attacker must know how to speak the RTU protocol to control the RTU. , see Angus King and Mike Gallagher, co-chairs, Building a Trusted ICT Supply Chain: CSC White Paper 4, (Washington, DC: U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission, October 2020), available at <, https://www.solarium.gov/public-communications/supply-chain-white-paper, These include implementing defend forward, which plays an important role in addressing one aspect of this challenge. 66 HASC, William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, H.R. An attacker that just wants to shut down a process needs very little discovery. Most Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) identify themselves and the vendor who made them. The most common configuration problem is not providing outbound data rules. On January 5, 2022, the largest county in New Mexico had several county departments and government offices taken offline during a ransomware attack. Specifically, DOD could develop a campaign plan for a threat-hunting capability that takes a risk-based approach to analyzing threat intelligence and assessing likely U.S. and allied targets of adversary interest. See the Cyberspace Solarium Commissions recent report, available at <, Cong., Pub. 1 (February 1997), 6890; Robert Jervis, Signaling and Perception: Drawing Inferences and Projecting Images, in Political Psychology, ed. Often it is the responsibility of the corporate IT department to negotiate and maintain long-distance communication lines. Nearly every production control system logs to a database on the control system LAN that is then mirrored into the business LAN. Work remains to be done. There is instead decentralized responsibility across DOD, coupled with a number of reactive and ad hoc measures that leave DOD without a complete picture of its supply chain, dynamic understanding of the scope and scale of its vulnerabilities, and consistent mechanisms to rapidly remediate these vulnerabilities. To support a strategy of full-spectrum deterrence, the United States must maintain credible and capable conventional and nuclear capabilities. Examples of removable media include: That means a thorough strategy is needed to preserve U.S. cyberspace superiority and stop cyberattacks before they hit our networks. An official website of the United States Government. Nikolaos Pissanidis, Henry Roigas, and Matthijs Veenendaal (Tallinn: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2016), 194, available at . See also Alexander L. George, William E. Simons, and David I. Some key works include Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Papers 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981); Lawrence D. Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (London: Macmillan, 1989); Robert Powell, Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard K. Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1987); Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Schelling, Arms and Influence. . L. No. L. No. Given the potentially high consequences of cyber threats to NC3 and NLCC, priority should be assigned to identifying threats to these networks and systems, and threat-hunting should recur with a frequency commensurate with the risk and consequences of compromise. A potential impediment to implementing this recommendation is the fact that many cyber threats will traverse the boundaries of combatant commands, including U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Strategic Command, and the geographic combatant commands. See also Alexander L. George, William E. Simons, and David I. 13 Nye, Deterrence and Dissuasion, 5455. Most of the attacker's off-the-shelf hacking tools can be directly applied to the problem. Cyberspace is critical to the way the entire U.S. functions. . A single firewall is administered by the corporate IT staff that protects the control system LAN from both the corporate LAN and the Internet. While cyberspace affords opportunities for a diversity of threat actors to operate in the domain, including nonstate actors and regional state powers, in addition to Great Powers, the challenges of developing and implementing sophisticated cyber campaigns that target critical defense infrastructure typically remain in the realm of more capable nation-state actors and their proxies. The literature on nuclear deterrence theory is extensive. In some, but not all, vendor's control systems, manipulating the data in the database can perform arbitrary actions on the control system (see Figure 15). Counterintelligence Core Concerns In that case, it is common to find one or more pieces of the communications pathways controlled and administered from the business LAN. Most control system networks are no longer directly accessible remotely from the Internet. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Richard K. Betts. Objective. This is why the commission recommends that DOD develop and designate a force structure element to serve as a threat-hunting capability across the entire DOD Information Network (DODIN), thus covering the full range of nonnuclear to nuclear force employment. As weapon systems become more software- and IT-dependent and more networked, they actually become more vulnerable to cyber-invasion. Ibid., 25. Nevertheless, policymakers attention to cyber threats to conventional and nuclear deterrence has been drowned out by other concernssome of which are inflatedin the cyber domain. If cybersecurity requirements are tacked on late in the process, or after a weapons system has already been deployed, the requirements are far more difficult and costly to address and much less likely to succeed.53 In 2016, DOD updated the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement (DFARS), establishing cybersecurity requirements for defense contractors based on standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Misconfigurations. Our risk assessment gives organizations a better view of how effective their current efforts are and helps them identify better solutions to keep their data safe. This articles discussion of credibility focuses on how cyber operations could undermine the credibility of conventional and nuclear deterrence, rather than the challenge of how to establish credible deterrence using cyber capabilities. In addition to congressional action through the NDAA, DOD could take a number of steps to reinforce legislative efforts to improve the cybersecurity of key weapons systems and functions. Early this year, a criminal ring dubbed Carbanak cyber gang was discovered by the experts at Kaspersky Lab, the hackers have swiped over $1 Billion from banks worldwide The financial damage to the world economy due to cybercrime exceed 575 billion dollars, the figures are disconcerting if we consider that are greater than the GDP of many countries. The business firewall is administered by the corporate IT staff and the control system firewall is administered by the control system staff. 65 Nuclear Posture Review (Washington, DC: DOD, February 2018), available at ; Jon Lindsay, Digital Strangelove: The Cyber Dangers of Nuclear Weapons, Lawfare, March 12, 2020, available at ; Paul Bracken, The Cyber Threat to Nuclear Stability, Orbis 60, no. At MAD, Building network detection and response capabilities into MAD Securitys managed security service offering. Large DCS often need to use portions of the business network as a route between multiple control system LANs (see Figure 5). Given that Congress has already set a foundation for assessing cyber vulnerabilities in weapons systems, there is an opportunity to legislatively build on this progress. Within the Intelligence Community, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence also plays a role in supply chain security through its counterintelligence mission, which includes the defense industrial base. 3 (2017), 381393. Search KSATs. For instance, he probably could not change the phase tap on a transformer. By Mark Montgomery and Erica Borghard >; Zak Doffman, Cyber Warfare: U.S. Military Admits Immediate Danger Is Keeping Us Up at Night, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/07/21/cyber-warfare-u-s-military-admits-immediate-danger-is-keeping-us-up-at-night/#7f48cd941061, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, Deterrence and the Cold War,, Robert J. 2 (Summer 1995), 157181. DODIG-2019-106 (Washington, DC: DOD, July 26, 2019), 2, available at . Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 104. Cyber vulnerabilities to DoD Systems may include All of the above Foreign Intelligence Entity . The Pentagon's concerns are not limited to DoD systems. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told the Defense Media Activity the private sector's cyber vulnerabilities also threaten national security because the military depends on commercial networks. . A mission-critical control system is typically configured in a fully-redundant architecture allowing quick recovery from loss of various components in the system. Nikolaos Pissanidis, Henry Roigas, and Matthijs Veenendaal (Tallinn: NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, 2016), 194, available at <, https://www.ccdcoe.org/uploads/2018/10/Art-12-Weapons-Systems-and-Cyber-Security-A-Challenging-Union.pdf, Weapon Systems Cybersecurity: DOD Just Beginning to Grapple with Scale of Vulnerabilities, , GAO-19-128 (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 2018), available at <, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-19-128.pdf, Lubold and Volz, Navy, Industry Partners Are Under Cyber Siege.. One study found that 73% of companies have at least 1 critical security misconfiguration that could potentially expose them to an attack. Holding DOD personnel and third-party contractors more accountable for slip-ups. 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cyber vulnerabilities to dod systems may include